


Give to the Shore, Turn the Tide

by summerstorm



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Memory, Multi, POV Female Character, Polyamory, Threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-24
Updated: 2010-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-14 01:33:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerstorm/pseuds/summerstorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It started when Elijah decided Elena should have all her memories back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Give to the Shore, Turn the Tide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [softlyforgotten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlyforgotten/gifts).



> Thank you so, so much to Ant. for brainstorming, ElW for beta, and Ann. for hand-holding and general sanity-preserving. Title from Matt Pond PA.

Elena hears the front door slam shut all the way from Stefan's room.

Stefan's been surprisingly blasé about Elena coming over to his house since he found out why she was being weird about that, but his entire body tightens at that. She can't help noticing—he's leaning back on his elbows, sitting near the edge of his bed with her straddling his hips. The pressure of his hands on her ass decreases dramatically, for one thing, and it's impossible to miss the way his shoulders tense up.

"Damon's downstairs," he says pointlessly, and she slips a hand under his t-shirt, stroking his side, thumb rubbing soft circles over his ribs.

"I got that," she points out, smiling. She's trying not to laugh. She shouldn't be so amused, but Stefan's hardly ever this awkward around her, and it's just funny to see him like this. Funny and actually kind of hot. She hooks her free thumb into one of the belt loops on his jeans and leans in to kiss him, rocking her hips lightly, rubbing down against him.

There's a stretch of time where he actually seems to relax into her touch; he brings a hand up to cup the back of her head and responds, opening his mouth under hers, kissing back for a while until he stops.

"Damon—" he begins apologetically, but she cuts him off, touching a finger to his mouth.

"—is around pretty often," she points out.

His chest rises as he breathes in. "I know I said it was fine," Stefan says. "And it is. I just—need to get used to it. It's not your fault."

She bites her lip. "Should it be?" she suggests, voice soft and thoughtful.

His expression turns contemplative, and he eyes her for a moment before asking, "Should it be what?"

It's probably going to come out of left field for him, asking this, but she's been thinking about it, and it's not like—it's not like she wants to open their relationship or anything. It's not even that she wants to add someone else to it. It's just—she's curious, and she knows her relationship with Stefan could get over this even if it went wrong.

There's no way to really build up to it, either, so she just asks.

"Can you—tell him," she begins, measuring her words, pausing, "to come up?"

She kind of expects Damon to just pop in without permission, because it's Damon, but he doesn't even though she knows, she just knows he must have heard her. It's actually—she has no way to know why he's not just yelling something inappropriate. Maybe he's doing whatever it is Damon does in his spare time. But she appreciates it anyway.

"Are you—" Stefan tries. "Really?"

She nods, shrugging sheepishly. "Yeah."

"I—I guess? It might be less awkward than this," he offers, though he looks thoroughly unconvinced. She doesn't know what exactly makes her smile, _beam_ , but she does all the same, and continues grinning even as she kisses him, just once. "I'm not really comfortable being the one who— I mean, it's _Damon_."

Elena draws her knees off the bed one at a time, keeping her hands on Stefan's body as she moves to stand. They're on his knees when she says, "I'll get him." Stefan leans back on his elbows again, and lets out a long-suffering sigh.

*

It started when Elijah decided Elena should have all her memories back.

It wasn't like he just woke up one day and thought he'd do something nice for Elena. They had a deal, and it didn't involve being nice to each other. Besides, Elijah was a guiltless, selfish, psychotic ancient asshole; he didn't really do nice. No. It had to do with Klaus, and a series of days Elena would really have done better not remembering, unless you thought about it in terms of, well, gaps in your memory. Elena was fully on board with having none of those.

There was a ritual, and there was a spell Bonnie needed Luka's dad's help with, but eventually they got through the whole thing.

When the process was complete, Elena felt exactly the same way she had before. She'd thought everything would come rushing back, like some kind of stream or _slideshow_ , a here-are-your-newly-unblocked-memories kind of thing. Elena was under the impression that was what it was like to be retroactively decompelled, what it was like for Caroline when she got those memories back, and she thought she'd just remember everything at once.

She didn't. Right away, she remembered some things, recent things, what Elijah was doing there and how she'd gotten here and what Elijah wanted her to remember. The process seemed to have reinstated her memories like they'd always been there; it was like she'd never been compelled at all, which meant she couldn't even call up that new knowledge by thinking about the times someone had used compulsion on her.

"You'll need kicks," Elijah said dismissively. She'd already told him what had happened, so there wasn't much riding on Elena's memory recovery for him anymore.

Elena looked at Bonnie for reassurance, and Bonnie shrugged. "The grimoires we looked at didn't say much about how your memories would come back. It could be like that."

It became clear enough that Elijah was right the next time Elena saw Stefan. It didn't happen immediately, but they were taking a walk and they ended up near Wickery Bridge, and suddenly there were flashes of him—his face, confused and determined in turns, his arms pulling her out of the car, lying on the floor with her head in his lap. It wasn't clear at all, not the way her memories of Klaus were, but then she'd been stuck between unconscious and near unconscious; the main reason she didn't remember much from that day wasn't supernatural.

"Are you okay?" Stefan said, and she snapped out of her trance. He was holding her; she was upright, could stand by herself, but his hands were under her forearms like she'd wobbled at some point, like he'd thought she might fall down. She dragged her arms back until her hands were on a level with his.

"Yeah," she said. Her breathing steadied as she leaned back into Stefan. "Yeah, I'm fine. The decompulsion spell is just—it's weird."

She felt Stefan shift behind her, hold her a little tighter. They were facing the bridge now. "I'm sorry," Stefan said, ducking his head into her neck. "I couldn't take any chances."

"No, I get it," Elena said. A part of her wished he hadn't just left back then; it might have been easier if someone had been able to tell her what happened, how she could have survived when neither of her parents did. But she knew disappearing completely was the only thing Stefan could have done, given everything.

In all truth, Elena was glad those moments were few and far between, because they made her feel dizzy and disoriented. She'd worn her necklace for most of the last two years, and before that Mystic Falls had gone through a quiet period, so there wasn't actually that much she could get back.

There were a couple of weird things she remembered from before she met Stefan, before Stefan came back to Mystic Falls at all. Elena knew the Council must have lasted this long for a reason, that there must have been vampire activity in town even if it wasn't as bad as the string of "animal attacks" when Damon first showed up, but it never occurred to her that it might have affected her. A couple of abrupt disappearances made a lot more sense now.

She wasn't really _surprised_ by anything until she woke up to find herself lying in an underground tunnel next to Damon.

*

She finds him in the kitchen, mixing a drink.

"This is so sudden, what is this about," Damon says flatly as soon as she can see him, raising his eyebrows.

"Why don't you try not playing games for once?" Elena smiles. "You know perfectly well I remember."

"Should I? I seem to recall you not telling me," Damon says, stirring his drink.

"Well, I seem to recall you making me forget, so I don't think you have a right to throw stones," she says calmly. They could be fighting about this. They could be yelling out accusations.

It's reassuring that they're not.

"Come up." She keeps her voice soft, certain enough to leave her words edgeless.

He offers a curt nod of acknowledgment, and she shrugs, turning around, and heads back upstairs.

*

Maybe the saddest part of the whole ordeal was that Elena wasn't at all surprised to find herself lying in an underground tunnel next to Damon.

When she came to, the first three things she noticed were that the ground was dirty, she was cold, and Damon was bleeding.

This particular situation started months ago, when Damon pissed off a werewolf. And failed to stop pissing off said werewolf. Elena was surprised Jules had taken this long to retaliate directly. Elena was surprised she'd done it outside a full moon, and that she'd chosen to fight him and stab him repeatedly with wooden spikes covered in traces of vervain.

Elena was also surprised her head didn't hurt; she had to have been hit pretty hard to fall unconscious. Elena was surprised Jules had even bothered to throw her in with Damon; he would have survived anyway, and Elena being there just gave him the option of feeding and healing and getting out of there faster.

She brought her wrist to his mouth, saying, "Come on, Damon, drink," as evenly as she could. She felt restless and basically like she'd slept on the floor, lack of headache aside, and she didn't actually like the idea of losing blood that much.

Damon wasn't reacting. She cupped his jaw with her other hand and slapped him with her fingers a few times, until he took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

"Come on," she repeated, pressing down with her wrist. She could feel his teeth on her skin. He just needed to bite down.

"What are you doing." There was no questioning inflection to his voice. His voice was hoarse and his throat was stiff under her hand, stretched tense.

"I'm giving you blood," Elena said. "Just take it. You need to drink."

"Get that out of my face." With a painful-looking grimace, he lifted his arm until his hand was on her elbow, tugging her arm off of him. She persisted. He was weak enough that she actually could stand her ground against him.

"You need to drink," she said. He rolled her eyes, and she remembered something. It wasn't from the decompulsion spell; it was just something she hadn't thought of yet. "Tonight," Elena said, "Damon, tonight is a full moon."

"Oh, fuck," he groaned out. "Are you—"

Elena straightened up and threw him a sharp look. "Just drink."

It hurt—it wasn't excruciating pain or anything, and her body felt numb, so she could almost rationalize it. She kept her eyes on his face, and it should have made it worse, watching him suck her blood, watching the open wound bleed, but what struck her hardest was the way he was drinking from her. Stefan always tried to stay detached and be really careful, and there was an undercurrent of self-reproach every time, like he couldn't entirely shake off the guilt. Damon was careful, too, but he wasn't detached at all; he was almost reverent, and there was an intensity to the way he held her arm and hand that—

She remembered. She remembered him kissing her, remembered that look on his face, remembered him telling her he loved her. She swallowed. It was—it was the first time she'd been surprised by the memory recovery process, but the truly weird part wasn't knowing what had happened: it was not having remembered it before. She'd spent time with Damon, she'd—she hadn't forgiven him, she couldn't, but he'd been acting like a decent person for a while, and she was getting there. She should have remembered this before; something should have kicked her mind into thinking of it before this.

She wasn't even surprised by the knowledge. It was like she'd long since processed it, like she'd stuck it down and stopped thinking about it altogether. Like it was something she had to deal with, something she'd learned not to think about.

But it was new again, now.

"What's wrong?" he asked when he recovered a little, pushing her arm away quickly. He looked like he was making an effort not to drink more, which she could appreciate.

Elena shook her head. It was—he'd made her forget, and he hadn't brought it up even though he knew she'd gotten all her compelled-out memories back. He didn't want to talk about it, and she definitely didn't want to talk about it, and it didn't make a difference. She was with Stefan—she wanted to be with Stefan. That hadn't changed, not since the last time she told Damon the same thing.

She liked Damon enough again to be tactful, and being tactful meant not saying a word of any of this.

"You mean other than everything?" she said, gesturing vaguely around with her head. "Come on, let's go."

She told Stefan about Jules, because she couldn't leave it to Damon to be straight to Stefan about anything, and she told Stefan about the blood thing, because he had a right to know and she wanted him to and she was walking around with a bandaged wrist. He wasn't happy about that, but he understood and he was getting along with Damon recently, so he actually thanked Elena for it before changing the subject.

It was fine, because she wasn't planning to say anything else, but there was so much she felt like she hadn't told him. She didn't tell him about how—weird it had felt, how even though Damon was weak and disgusting, as she closed her eyes she remembered that kiss and his mouth on her wrist was rough but leveled and then he'd stopped drinking and lapped up the trail and actually kissed her wrist and she'd looked down and their eyes had met and it had been—weird.

She wanted to tell him about the kiss, too, the kiss she could now remember, and what Damon had said to her, but she wasn't sure she wanted Stefan to know. What he didn't know wouldn't hurt him, and it wasn't like she was going to do anything about it. She felt like she had to tell him, all the same, but she couldn't find the right moment, and some visceral part of her mind was convinced it was in the past, completely forgotten, not a pressing matter at all, so she kept putting it off. She didn't take it off the table, telling Stefan, but she singled out faraway moments as possible times to tell him and postponed it when she got there.

Nobody was going to bring it up, anyway. Damon wasn't, and nobody else knew.

It felt wrong that nobody else knew.

"What did you just say Damon did?" Bonnie said. She looked—well, she looked largely incredulous, which Elena could understand.

"He told me he loved me," Elena said, trying out the words, "and then he compelled me to forget it."

Bonnie looked at her blankly. "Well, he did kiss you that one time—"

Elena shook her head. "That wasn't me. That was Katherine."

"He thought it was you. From his perspective, it's exactly the same thing."

"I don't know, does it even count if someone makes you forget?" Elena said, rising off the bed. She needed to move, even if it was just pacing along her bedroom.

"Does it matter?"

Elena huffed out a laugh. "Yes," she said. "Yes, it matters. If he wasn't just messing with me, that matters."

"Why?" Bonnie said. It wasn't an accusing tone anymore; it was the tone Bonnie used to ask questions Elena needed to figure out the answer to on her own, and right now that was about as helpful as silence.

Elena breathed in deep and dropped down on her bed. She shrugged. "I don't know," she said softly. She didn't. It shouldn't even be a thing, it was just _Damon_ being Damon, and it wasn't like she hadn't heard it a remarkable amount of times from people who really shouldn't have been invested enough in her love life to even notice.

It was just weirder, now, spending time at the Salvatore house, knowing Damon was around somewhere. She'd always known that was possibility, and there was always the time or two or a hundred that Damon paid enough attention to them to yell out answers to questions he had not been asked. Damon still did that, but now it was weird, and Stefan could tell it was weird, so she ended up making excuses to have Stefan come over to her house instead of the other way around as often as possible.

*

"You know he's just going to make you wait, right?" Stefan says after a while, when Damon doesn't show.

It's an interesting remark given she's running her hands over Stefan's chest and just popped the button on his jeans. The most uncomfortable thing is her hair, which keeps slipping out from behind her ears and getting in her face. Other than that, she's happy where she is; Stefan's body is warm beneath her, and she's really enjoying the attempt to keep things slow and leisurely. His hands are warm on her waist, the small of her back, and better when he slips one under the waistband of her pants and sets the other on her stomach, dragging her shirt over her bra as he moves it up to cup one of her breasts.

"No, he's not," she says, smiling, and when she looks up, Damon's there, beside the headboard, staring right at her. "Jesus," she gasps out, bringing her hand to her chest. Stefan twines their fingers there—his grip is kind of possessive, and she barely manages to suppress an amused grin.

Damon smirks at her. "You called?"

Stefan strains his neck to catch a glimpse of him. "Don't be an asshole," he says, and Damon rolls his eyes at him. Stefan ignores him and grabs Elena's face, pulling her down for a kiss. It's so sudden she stumbles onto her palms by his sides and a short, surprised sound comes out through her nose. He doesn't let go of her for a while, and she doesn't push him because it's kind of perfect, having Stefan's hands on her face and his tongue in her mouth and the way he feels about her spelled out through how quickly he just switched gears even though she's not going anywhere.

At one point, his hips start rocking up against hers, and yeah—she bites his lip—yeah, that's good, and she knows Damon's looking at her, looking at _them_ , and that's good, too.

"Do you just want me to stay here and watch?"

Elena thinks it over and says, "Yes. I do."

"You realize I've done this many, many times before," Damon points out. "I don't really need your permission."

Elena eyes him with a moue of distaste, and says, "I'm going to let that one slide."

"That seems like the best alternative," Damon agrees.

"You may have, but I haven't," Elena says. "I didn't know you were there."

"I can respect that," he says, crossing his arms and leaning back against the wall.

*

This, though—this started with the spring formal.

It almost didn't even happen. It didn't use to—Caroline decided they needed one a couple of years earlier, and they'd had one every year ever since, but it wasn't much of a tradition. Deep down, it was really more of a way to channel Caroline's inactivity jitters into something useful and help Bonnie work through her regular bouts of academic-related stress. Bonnie had stress to work through this year, definitely, but Caroline wasn't bored, and she wasn't exactly free, and she'd been talking about putting all her efforts and the school's dance budget towards the prom for months.

"I just feel guilty it won't be my only one," Caroline said the last time Elena asked about that, something like four days before Caroline made her sign up for the Spring Formal Committee.

"Are you really planning to go back to school soon?" Bonnie said.

"No," Caroline said, looking at Bonnie like that was a ridiculous question. "But I could. I feel guilty in advance."

Still, the spring formal happened, and the spring formal _happened_.

Elena thought it would be one of those dances Stefan would rope her into by, well, asking her. Which it was—he didn't really have to ask: Caroline was planning it, so Elena had to go anyway, and they'd just started to make plans absently when Jenna asked Elena about it over dinner. It was supposed to be one of Stefan's "little moments" where absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened and she got to dance and drink horrible drinks and walk barefoot down the driveway with her shoes hanging precariously on her—or possibly Stefan's, probably Stefan's—fingers.

Here's what actually happened: Caroline had been having a freakout over a summer program she'd gotten into, not so much because of the program itself but because it made her start thinking about the future—her future as a vampire, her future as someone who'd have to either tell people she was what she was or leave them behind. She actually went stag to the spring formal, which was incredibly weird for Caroline, especially considering she could literally have her pick of dates. That basically meant Elena, Stefan and Bonnie took turns making sure she was doing something, which she usually was, and keeping her entertained if she wasn't.

Stefan was much, much better at crisis management than either Bonnie or Elena were, so Elena was dateless for about fifteen minutes of every half hour.

Elena kind of loved seeing Stefan with Caroline, how well they seemed to get along and understand each other, and she was glad Caroline had someone to talk to. It would have been fine, except by a cruel, sick twist of fate, Alaric had "caught something" before the dance—which unofficially meant he'd had to go out of town to deal with some tricky vampire stuff—and Damon had offered to replace him as a chaperone.

Damon didn't really take chaperoning seriously. He didn't disappear or anything, but he completely ignored the kind of things teachers were supposed to prevent, and he kept chatting up girls like he was at a bar instead of a high school dance.

"You're acting like a creepy pervert," Elena felt the need to tell him when the girl he'd been talking to—Cassie Pearson—wandered off.

"I see my brother is neglecting his duties as your date," Damon said.

Elena rolled her eyes. "Don't change the subject."

"I didn't think that was a _subject_ ," Damon said. "It sounded like a one-off insult to me. You know, like when you want my company but you're too proud to say, 'Hey, Damon, I'm bored, won't you keep me entertained?' and instead go with the cheap attack."

"It's even worse when I can hear the words coming out of your mouth," Elena marveled, but it was more mockery than anything else; there was no real bite to it.

"I'm not particularly enjoying this conversation either," Damon said, and Elena was about to turn on her heels and go find Stefan when he added, "Why don't we dance instead?"

And that wasn't really uncharted territory, plus she'd just reached a point in her acceptance process where she kept wondering if it was selfish of her not to talk to Damon about what she'd remembered now, since he probably suspected she knew now, and dancing was much less scary than that.

It was actually—it was _nice_ , dancing with Damon. He'd had a lot of practice, and he was good, and he wasn't as strongly against showing off as Stefan was, which made for a pretty entertaining experience. The first song was upbeat, and he really went all out, and it would have been embarrassing except by the end she was laughing and when she caught Stefan's eye, Stefan didn't look wary or skeptical; he just smiled at her.

She kept glancing at Stefan through a slower song, over Damon's shoulder; now, when Stefan met her eyes, it was a little less fun, a little more serious, more intense. She held tighter onto Damon and she looked at Stefan and Damon said, "I can feel your eyes on him."

"But I'm still here, aren't I?" she said, breaking away, and he nodded like he was satisfied with her answer before drawing her in.

It wasn't a big realization. It was sudden, maybe, but it wasn't like a switch flipped on or fireworks went off. She knew Katherine had had them both, Damon and Stefan, but she _wasn't_ Katherine, she would never be like Katherine, and she loved Stefan, she loved him so much she couldn't imagine not being with him or hurting him in any way. And Damon—

Damon loved her.

She laughed into his shoulder at the thought. It was the first time she'd felt anything even remotely positive about it.

"What's funny?" Damon said, and Stefan smiled at her, his brow a little furrowed, and she thought maybe—not now, but maybe sometime down the line—maybe this could be good, too.

She did walk barefoot from Stefan's car to her house, holding her own shoes, and he kept a warm hand on the small of her back until they reached the doorway. She unlocked the door and stepped in, turning around to face him. "You coming in?"

"If you want," he said.

She snatched his jacket from around his arm with a smile and headed upstairs, which basically meant he was already there by the time she got to her room. She closed the door behind her and walked over to him.

"Hey," he said, cradling her jaw with his palm, thumbing at her lips, and she took a deep breath. She was going to tell him about Damon. She was. But kissing Stefan seemed so much more appealing, and talking about how his brother had told her he was in love with her and made her forget, as much as she'd warmed up to it, seemed like it would ruin the moment pretty much irreversibly.

The Damon thing still came up that night, only later, because for some reason it seemed much more appropriate to approach the conversation as pillow talk than interrupt something before it had even started.

"In love with you," Stefan said, nodding. "Yeah, I can't say I'm surprised."

"Yeah," she said, fingers fluttering absently over his stomach. "And he knows I might remember, but he hasn't brought it up, so. I think he was serious about it."

"He probably was," Stefan said. "Are you okay?"

She took a deep breath and rested her head on his chest. "Yeah," she said, "I'm good," and she meant it.

*

Elena crawls down Stefan's body until her knees are at both sides of his ankles. She can't help glancing at Damon, and she ends up keeping her eyes on him as she bends over Stefan's legs, hands on her hips. She's wary and she's actually in kind of a weird position now, but it has a _point_ , so she makes sure to attend to it: she drags Stefan's jeans and underwear over his legs, dropping down to the floor to get them properly off before climbing back over him.

She wants them both to be okay with this. Selfishly, she wants them both to want this, too, to want what she wants, to be okay with sharing her and sharing each other and—and it doesn't even have to be about sharing, dating both of them, because there's so much more to this than splitting time, and she could never think of—of love, or anything else, as some sort of pie chart.

At first, it's distracting, knowing Damon is there; she's comfortable here, in this room, with Stefan, and she's here, in this room, with Stefan, and she shouldn't—she shouldn't think about how she's coming off, not when Damon's basically a self-declared voyeur who's apparently watched her fuck Stefan more than once, and probably hears them—listens to them—have sex on a regular basis.

She takes a deep, long breath, and thinks _screw it_.

She slides off the bed and undresses quickly, yanking her pants down and kicking them off as she unclasps her bra and tosses it aside. She stands to her full height at the edge of Stefan's bed, leaning down with a hand on his shin, and her eyes shift to Damon before she can think better of it. She'd still look at him, if she thought better of it; she pulls her hair back, running her fingers over her scalp, and think about how she's deliberately naked and Damon is watching her and Stefan's waiting for her to decide what to do—to decide how to follow up, because this was her idea.

Stefan's hands are by his sides, palms facing up the way they do when he's really in for something she wants to do, when he's willing to go with it the whole time she decides to string him along, and it's such a thrill, every time. It's Stefan and he's always great about this and she always loves it, loves the feeling of his gaze fixed on her, loves the feeling of making him wait.

"I thought you guys weren't waiting for anyone," Damon says, and Elena glares at him, for listening in and for interrupting her moment.

"I thought you were going to try to behave."

She bends onto her hands and knees on the bed, over Stefan's legs, and wraps her fingers around the base of his cock, giving it a light tug. His fists tighten on the bedspread as she leans in to lick around the head, feather-light kisses just teasing, getting him wound up and wet, getting herself wound up and wet. She sticks her free hand between her legs and uses two fingers to help it all along, pressure skirting around her clit before she slides them up inside.

Belatedly, Damon says, "I said no such thing," and Stefan throws him a skeptical look at the same time she raises an eyebrow, looking up. She takes the chance to suck the head of Stefan's cock into her mouth, harder than before, and feels Stefan's hands on her—one on her head and one on her shoulder. It's almost automatic now, the way he does that when she sucks him, like having his cock in her mouth and her sitting over his knees isn't enough physical contact, like he needs to touch her and make sure she won't go away.

"Damon," Stefan calls out, "Damon, grab her hips," and suddenly there are hands on them, and she can feel the fabric of Damon's pants on her bare ass. She takes the hand between her legs back, using it to lever herself on the bed. This is not what she was planning, but she arches into Damon's hands anyway and swallows down Stefan's cock, deciding to do this for a bit longer, just long enough that Stefan's acceptance will go one step further, just long enough to feel Damon's hand slide down and into her inner thigh and hear Stefan say, "Yeah."

Damon's fingers are long and experimental, trying out spots and speeds and pressure points in a rhythmically jumbled way. It's the complete opposite of Stefan's fingers on her scalp, and a little later Stefan's fingers rolling her nipples when she pulls her mouth off him and reaches up.

"Stop," she says, looking back at Damon. It's not a command, but it might as well be; he pulls his fingers out, dragging them over her ass as he sits down on the edge of the bed. His fingertips skirt over the small of her back for a bit, and fall down to the back of her knees as she crawls up Stefan's body.

This is what she wants to do, right now. It's not much of a threesome thing to do, but she doesn't think she's ready yet for anything more than Damon's eyes on her, and his hands—

Stefan does this thing where he lifts her up when she rides him, holding her hips and helping her along, and she knows what's coming every time, she knows what she wants to feel, but now she has Damon behind her, pressed up against her back with all his clothes on and his head in her neck, teeth tracing the skin over her shoulder, leading down to her shoulderblades. His body's a steady presence, but she can't control his mouth and she definitely can't control his hands, and when she rocks her hips into Stefan's, there's an element of surprise that should be jarring, but somehow isn't, because it's actually—there's something orderly about it.

There's something orderly about it, and she realizes with a shudder that Damon's hands started on her shoulders, that he's been making his way down her body slowly and randomly because he's touching everything.

Stefan's hands stop helping her along when Damon reaches her lower belly, and she doesn't know, she's not sure but Stefan's looking somewhere behind her head and then they're both touching her right where she needs it the most, Damon's fingers rubbing rough, tight circles around her clit and Stefan's stretching her out further, controlling the waves of pressure and tension and making them so much more overwhelming.

It doesn't take long for her to lose leverage, and she finds herself leaning back against Damon, letting him hold her up as she rolls her hips into Stefan's cock and their combined touch and her mouth falls open and her body starts shaking, shuddering out her orgasm. She keeps up the rhythm automatically for a little longer, with Damon's hands damp on her hips, until Stefan holds onto her thighs and his head tips back and he comes inside her.

Damon's still holding her hips when she lies forward over Stefan, recovering her breath; the touch is light enough that Stefan slips out easily, but it's also light enough that she nearly misses it when Damon pulls back.

She reaches back to grab his wrist.

"You're not pulling me into your sentimental cuddly afterparty," Damon says, but she doesn't let go, and he doesn't use any of his strength to get away. "I'm serious. If you're not going to get me off, I need to go jerk off."

She considers it, running her other hand over Stefan's arm. "Can't you just wait?" She feels Stefan's laugh rumble through her body, pulling a few mild aftershocks out of her.

He doesn't answer, and she feels a little bad for asking, because, yeah, he was a psychopath first, but he's actually been waiting for kind of a long time—Katherine, first, and then Elena.

"Yeah," he says, running a hand from her back to her shoulders, kneading absently. He sounds like he's rolling his eyes. "I guess I can wait."

"Good," she says, and, "shut up," before he has a chance to ask if she needs to always have the last word.


End file.
